UKC

We are laying laminate flooring throughout our house, and would like it not to get scratched. Felt pads don't stay on chair legs, we have always found that they just come unstuck and fall off really quickly (this lot lasted about a month on our dining chairs). I feel like there has to be a better way! Any better suggestions?

Beer mats

Chair socks (they are a real thing)

These, maybe?:

https://www.keayvitalparts.co.uk/products/1-copy-of-screw-in-rubber-furnitu...

You can get felt pads which screw into the leg of chairs (assuming they're wooden), which I've found do stay in place well. I prefer felt to the rubber type ones, as they glide nicely meaning that you can easily slide chairs in and out, rather than them juddering along the floor or your guests tipping backwards as they try to slide their chair out from the table to stand up.

This sort of thing: https://amzn.eu/d/8vtkTAV

Remember those plastic floor protectors you would slot beneath the poles standing at either end of a 1970's-1980's tent to prevent them from ripping through the floor?

They may leave plastic marks though, but no doubt would prevent scratches so long as the plastic was soft enough.

Lay a nice carpet down over the laminate to protect it

I feel your pain (laminate floor sitting room). Ikea furniture has plastic knobs under which seem to be ok, and bits of folded up cardboard box work surprisingly well, but this is the way to go:

https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Hoverchairs?file=Screen_shot_2012-11-27_at_8....

alternatively, beanbags and derivatives of 😁

Or get people to carry a bit of carpet around with them and place them under pieces of furniture when needed.
The easy cleaning advantages of laminate flooring, but with that touch of class that can be only be had with a nice bit of ruggery.

Thanks, these certainly look good for the dining chairs, as they are wood. Not sure if we will get them to work on tye living room arm chairs as they have metal legs with wee plastic stoppers in them. They might go in ok though, worth a try. 

If not, the socks look good. 

Thanks folks!

For your living room, depending on if the legs are visible and part of the design, you could probably avoid plastic tat. A bit of plank or ply, wrapped in a nice bit of cloth under each leg. Or under both legs on one side, if its a couch or something heavy to spread the weight. With a bit of thought you could make it a design feature.

The issue I found with felt pads on chair legs (previous house had a lot of laminate flooring from previous owner) is that they collect all the dust and hair from the floor and need regular cleaning themselves.

But yes, they are the best solution.

It may be better to choose a more durable floor in the first place.

Legs are visible and part of the design. Should be able to come up with some sort of sock design though which looks ok. 

Laminate is cleanable!! Carpets really aren't that hygienic and also make the underfloor heating less effective. We also like the look of it better too.

You might be anticipating a problem that won't be one.  The laminate flooring in our dining room looks completely unmarked, and we've had chair and table legs moving around on it through all the nine years we've been here and not a single felt pad has ever come off a leg.

But the felt pads do attract dust and hairs.  I view that as a positive, as it means I don't have to chase them round the rest of the room.

T.

We used to find felt pads came off regularly in our old house, and the last lot we put on here have started to come off after a month. Maybe we just got rubbish pads?! 

I have now ordered some of the screw in ones suggested above, so we will see what those are like

The short answer: Nothing will work but various things will make the damage a bit less bad.

The solution depends a bit on what the bottom of your furniture legs look like. Ideally you want to spread the load over a wider area to avoid indent points. If you get something simple like socks, they'll come off and be generally broken in just a few weeks of use and you'll spend your life replacing them regularly. If you get something more solid that screws onto the base of the legs, they will stay put for longer but when they catch on something and get broken off, you might find the damage to the screw hole in the bottom of the leg makes them tricky to replace. To about dents effectively, what you really want is something on the bottom of each leg that gives the base an area about 2 inches across or so... but that will probably a) look ugly on the feet of your furniture and b) be more prone to getting broken off by accident.

Both felt and rubber products work but felt is worse for picking up little sharp things and then scratching them across the floor when furniture is moved.

Or you could just get some Ikea chairs: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/poaeng-armchair-oak-veneer-knisa-light-beige-s...

https://www.stabletablepro.com/

The owners was fried on dragons den a decade plus ago. 

Or a dog...

I've got two Poang chairs which I love. Prompted by your post I just turned one upside down, the runners are caked with crud ironically probably picked up as I slide it around to vacuum. The laminate floor floor does have some scratches. Lesson learnt.

Pinned or screwed felt gliders - little round felt pads you can pin/nail/screw to chair legs.

Screwfix/amazon do them. 

I would agree that it looks nice and Im a huge fan of cleanable floors over dirt harbouring carpets.

I'm just surprised that laminates are so easily damaged.

Hammocks and suspended swing chairs

In my experience they vary a lot. Having now laid quite a few laminate floors in apartments, I wouldn't choose anything that wasn't of class AC4 - intensive use. I don't know whether the AC coding is used in the UK but I'd expect there to be some other yardstick. They do cost more, though often not that much more. And it's definitely worth it.

I must try to remember that.

Whilst we have a few softwood floors that would benefit from laminating we are fortunate that most of our floors are beautiful centuries old elm planks. The only problem being that they tend to wear the legs off modern furniture

Our old house had a fairly high quality laminate. It didn't damage super easily, but it did damage. The one we are laying here is a bit more mid-range. We couldn't afford the higher quality as we are doing such a large area. I don't really know whether it will damage more easily or not, but I'm quite keen not to find out! 

ooh, I like that idea!

It's not really that they are easily damaged, it's more that you are subjecting them to extreme conditions on a daily basis and expecting them to last for years. If you take fragments of some rock like granite that might come into the house in any number of ways, (e.g. shoe soles) and scrape it across the floor with 20kg of chair bearing down on it, or worse yet, with 100kg of chair + person, any material short of sapphire crystal is going to struggle to remain undamaged, and, well, one does not simply make a floor out of sapphire crystal  

I guess that leaves the question of how our old house floors have lasted for hundreds of years.

Maybe it's down to parents who regularly repeated the mantra "don't drag your chair, pick it up"

Superglue the felt pads to the chair feet. They won't come off then! Our have lasted 7 years and counting.

I note your use of the past tense there. In my family home it is very much present tense!

Also, I have no doubt that floor materials have succumbed to the same cheap materials, throw it out every few years, modern disposable culture that has claimed everything else. And perhaps to a lesser extent, indestructible materials from the past are too toxic to live with or hazardous to dispose of in todays more enlightened society.

I use panel pins or heavy duty staples through the felt pads to hold them on furniture feet, making sure the heads are well driven in so they don't scratch the floor even worse.

Do these only really work in vertical chair/furniture legs? Our chair legs are angled. They have a plastic foot bit at the bottom but it’s crap and felt pads are needed to avoid gauging a trench in the floor, but they don’t last long, wonder if the felt part of these screw in jobbies compresses/disintegrates to nothing also 

I’d nail your furniture to the floor so it can’t be moved, and hence not scratch anything. 

You can get heavy duty stick on felt pads call"x-proctor" on amazon. They come in pack of eight 20 x 15 cm sheets for about £12. You just cut then to the size you need. I've had some on the dining table for about 3 years with no problems. The ones on the chairs get more use, but I've only replaced them once in 3 years.

It is currently past tense here as our daughter has taken the hint.

I guess that it may become present tense once more for a future generation

yes, but you need to nail or superglue them down as they slide about

In reply to plyometrics:

These look good, I tried those clear plastic cups with rubbery felt on the bottom and they were rubbish. Your suggestion looks way better